Giallo

Pulp: cheap paper and tissue plots; blood on the roses. Poshlost. Square jaws, bared breasts, punk music and broken glass. Don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air.

Innumeracy

We die in the hundreds when the bombs fall, in the thousands when the armies cut through. We dig the mass graves then fill them, falling unmarked and unrecorded into a nameless dirt hole. We are statistics in the headlines, less the soldiers or the prize than another battlefield, churned up into nothing.

We are the ones who did not escape the rising waters, who died trapped in our cars when the wildfire jumped the two lane road, who stayed on the mountain until the mud came boiling through our living rooms. They’ll dig us out, some of us, but not all; our records are lost, our families dead, unmourned and unmemoried.

When the riots come, we are caught crossing the street, looking the wrong way for traffic until the crack of the police sniper chases the bullet over the head of the crowd and arrives too late for our ears to catch it, our brains to parse it. We die unknowing.

House of Wolves

Edge of Cowtown.

Horny and temporarily flush from the Vanness thing, Markfeet knocks on the door. Grill snaps open and a pair of bloodshot eyes glare down at her from underneath an overgrown unibrow. “You a cop?”

She stares back, outraged. “Do I look like a fucking cop?”

The eyes huff a laugh and the door swings wide. Railthin woman with thick black hair on her arms and a star tattoo on the web between her thumb and forefinger. “Upstairs,” she says, so upstairs Markfeet goes, after paying her the fifty bucks.

Afterwards, she lays back, a little raw, a little bloody, smokes a joint and watches him wash himself, face, hands, feet, mouth at the little tap. He hums tunelessly. Shakes himself dry, pricks his ears at her curiously. “Sure,” Markfeet says, “we got plenty of time. Make yourself comfortable.”

He grins and lies down next to her, suddenly much hairier, a comfortable, friendly warmth next to her legs. Markfeet stretches luxuriously and curls around him.

In the Summer We Remember Winter

They wrapped you in chains you could have shrugged off like cobwebs and cracked the ice to sink you in the pond next to the old kennels. You watched their shadows pass away as you settled to the bottom, blood heavy in your belly like the stone they tied to your ankles, lungs flat and empty until the water wormed its way in, surrounded by the scattered bones of the dogs no one needed.

You could have, easily enough, fought your way free, at any point from when they kicked open the door of your basement, but what would be the point? One spot was as good as another.

The sun rises and they gather to stare at you through the ice, and you play dead, or close enough; eyes opened and unfocused, chest still, stirred by the current. They count themselves successful, save one child, hypnotized with dread, who lingers. You close your right eye slowly: a knowing wink. They gasp and run off and you hear the sound of distant laughter. You were legend enough to kill, but not legend enough to believe in.

Still, you remember the child’s face; they will be worth looking up when the pond and memories have thawed. Faith should be justified.

The Edges of Empire

Every day was some new apocalypse, some looming end of the world drifting through the sickly orange of the sky like fine ash: invisible until it piled up on rooftops and car hoods and skin, notable mostly for how it dragged at their lungs like running. Plague and fire and flood; civil wars and the rumors of wars, dead spots in the sea, deserts swallowing fertile land, birds falling from the sky, whales washing up on beaches. Bones in the street.

They are at home here, if lonely, too wild for humanity, too human for anything else, an outcast in more stable times, but now just one more wary shape on the empty roads. They sloughed their skin years ago when the winter drove them west, a refugee from blizzards, simoons, tornados. The west is a thin skin of green atop a bottomless lake of desert, but it’s still bearable, for now, a heedless island of smug superiority even as the rivers run dry and the cliffsides collapse.

Coming down from the mountains, overgrown and ripe, they meet another exile, face impenetrable behind a layer of road filth. They circle each other, wary as dogs, sniff the air, weigh the options before edging in. They come together without relief, but for a moment the pall of doom is lightened.

Welcome to Detroit

So she’s tied to the block with the witch doing some witch shit, and her friend the possessed zombie comes sidling up to her and says, maybe I should kill you, you know, just so the witch doesn’t get your power.

“Excuse me?” says America.

you know, she’s just so powerful, says the possessed zombie, what with the magic and all the knowledge she got from using the evil book, it’d be pretty dangerous if she got your power to hop through dimensions, too. maybe i should just, y’know. kill you.

“Wait, where are you right now?”

oh well, says the possessed zombie, awkwardly, and coughs. in a collapsing dimension where an evil version of me was using the evil book to kill other versions of me across dimensions. we had a magic fight because he wanted to kill me. which i won. obviously

“But the zombie thing?”

well now i mean i couldn’t just leave you here where the witch could eat you, that wouldn’t work, so i uh i mean i used the evil book to cross dimensions and take control of this dead body of the version of me that tried to kill you. so you know i know that letting people hop dimensions is

he pauses

it’s bad i guess is what i’m saying. can’t let the witch do it, that would be

he pauses again

bad. that would be bad. i should probably kill you just to be safe?

Frankly by that point she’s seriously considering letting the witch eat her.